


and all our yesterdays have lighted fools / the way to dusty death

by aurrie



Series: all the galaxy's a stage [1]
Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Cathar Sith Warrior, Claustrophobia, Dark fic, Dehumanisation, Draahg is a smarmy bastard, Draahg used Sith!Vicious mockery! It's super effective!, Flashbacks, Gen, I had a minor existential crisis over whether it was Draagh or Draahg, Male-Female Friendship, Minor Character Death, Non-Binary Main Character, Queer-Platonic Relationship, Semi-permanent injuries, Xenophobia, [makes wiggly hand gestures] idk, bad decisions abound, but not described HEAVILY implied but not described, ever just been fuelled exclusively by spite and rage and survive on that?, hurt/not much comfort, partial memory loss (implied), past depictions of slavery, past hand mutilation, past usage of shock collars and cattle prods, species based discrimination, suicide ideation, trans main character, what a Draag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:27:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24687613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurrie/pseuds/aurrie
Summary: The truth is not kind. The truth is not gentle.Neither is he.Under the rubble of a cavern on Quesh, Rylthos is haunted by the ghosts of his past, and takes up a hefty mantle in the name of them.
Relationships: Vette & Male Sith Warrior, past Male Sith Warrior/Original Male Character
Series: all the galaxy's a stage [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1787530
Comments: 22
Kudos: 19





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Burnout](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12366330) by [pomegrenadier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pomegrenadier/pseuds/pomegrenadier). 



> (see end of fic for notes.)

Death was something Rylthos had always flirted with. It was the nature of a Sith to be in lock step with any number of ways to die, just as they brought death upon others. To be Sith was to be a double edged sword.

When Draahg's holo-image flickers to life from the stand projector and the force field cuts off the exit behind him, he knows his time has come. He'd been anticipating this since before the War Trust was dismantled, and he'd known that his lease as Baras' apprentice was swiftly coming to an end.

Perhaps his only failing was that he should have anticipated the severance would happen sooner.

"Our master," Draahg says, and how he _delights_ in gloating, "prides himself on always three steps ahead of everyone, including you, _friend."_ The man's image oozes arrogance even several light-years away. He can't sense his presence on the planet nor even in the sector. 

_Coward._

He growls low in response and his helmet vocal filters amplifies it to a thundering rumble like a Kaasi storm. Being imposing is a boon, at least for his confidence. "We've never been friends."

"Come now, surely you knew your only purpose was to be his _attack beast,"_ and Draahg lingers on those words, his lips curling upwards with a smirk. 

How Ry wishes he could wipe it clean off his face. 

"That's all you've ever been, really. Dress it up any way you like, but none of your missions have required any finesse or real intelligence. You're set on our master's foes and you come running back. So dutiful. _Expendable._ You should've known you would outlive your usefulness sooner or later."

"I think you'll find I'm capable of more than that. You and Baras are underestimating me by a long stretch, Draahg." 

Draahg is toying with him. There's not much he can do in this position that gives him any leverage, but he isn't going to give him the satisfaction of just rolling over and taking it.

A clipped, haughty laugh. "There is no underestimation, _friend._ You're using very bold words for a cornered beast trapped in a cave. Although I suppose it's not the first time, you should be used to this, quite frankly."

His patience is growing thin. "Used to _what?"_

"Oh, you haven't figured it out yet?" Draahg seems _delighted_ by this. "How very predictable. I'll spell it out for you - Baras has groomed you for _years._ Our master knows _everything_ there is to know. And he has grand designs." Draahg makes a grandiose sweeping gesture to accentuate the point, and Rylthos wonders if he could be any more theatrical. "Designs you no longer feature in. I'm merely taking out the trash."

"Your sycophantism is clearly blinding you, then. He's a man as fallible as we are, and his reach has an end. He's using us both," he snarls back. "But you know _nothing_ of me."

Draahg is bluffing. It has to be a bluff. Bait. Baras didn’t have the reach. What would he want with him? But... he finds himself less sure of it the more he considers.

Baras is pedantic, he knows this firsthand, he sees the first sign of a fracture, the smallest crack, and worms his way in. He’s insidious like that. So is Draahg.

"Oh, but I do. You're deluding yourself, your fate was sealed the moment you tailed that Jedi fool, your so-called "Master", to Nar Shaddaa as a whelp. A mangy cub, a disgraced Padawan abandoned by his family, a broken slave fighting for scraps. The perfect candidate to be moulded in our master's image. Had you not run and had the guts to follow through on that last trial, you could've stayed exalted at his side." 

Cold dread settles in his chest. Nar Shaddaa? How does he know those things? Does he mean…?

It's always been at the back of his mind, these doubts, ever since he was dispatched to kill his deep cover spies. He assumes they were one of many, a faceless monolith that supported Baras; Rylon, Fawste, _Monk._ They’d been there for _years._ Decades, perhaps.

When he probes the Force rings clear around Draahg's aura. None of the murk that surrounded him before. There are no walls, no obfuscation. He can't deny it.

It's… It's true.

Unbidden, the memory of Master Zhet comes to him, the smoke and the blaster fire clearing, and the sight as clear as day. He's fifteen again; small, timid, helpless. Zhet's lips form a small 'o' as he's impaled on his own lightsaber (had he eyes and a mask covering them he imagines they would have bulged out) by one of the Republic grunts (no, Baras' lackeys) escorting them to their mission, as if it were just yesterday --

Draahg cackles.

_Fuck._

He's grateful for the privacy his helmet allows, denying him the pleasure of seeing his panic written freely on his face, but his silence and his tenseness have betrayed him nonetheless. Doubt and fear bleeds into his aura, a hemorrhage, sanguine red in a body of deep, clear ocean. He's losing blood and treading water, there's no hope of rescue or land to swim to; Draahg the circling firaxa, opportunistic.

"Struck a nerve, have I? So easily uncentered."

He tries to regain his momentum with a riposte. "Baras would never have happened. He trusts no one enough for that, nor would he ever allow it. You'll meet the same fate as me soon enough." A beat. "If I don't get to you first and rend you _limb from limb."_

"Aww. Such concern, how touching. Leave me to worry about the former, I assure you, I'm quite safe from your empty threats, but that would be an amazing trick all the same."

Fucking _bastard_. He'd rip his head from his shoulders and the tongue from his jaw if he were with him for that.

"Ah, but I forget myself. As much as I'm enjoying watching you squirm, I'm afraid this must end." Draahg looks thoughtful and holds the detonator up. "It's been a singular honour to be the one to put you down; you were his fiercest, after all." His thumb is now mere millimeters from the button. "Goodbye."

The walls of the cavern shudders and the ceiling caves in.

He doesn't remember much else after that.


	2. Chapter 2

Consciousness is _agony._ So much pain. It hurts to _breathe,_ to _think._ The detonation rattled his skull enough that his ears feel like they're going to start bleeding. All there is is ringing. It would be so much easy to just

_ "stop _

_ struggling." _

_ White hot pain shoots through his skull, his vision's gone and his body is spasming and twitches on the cold metal floor but his cheek stays firmly pressed into it. His mouth tastes of copper (has he lost a tooth in the beatings before or just bitten his tongue?) and there's a heavy boot pressing on the side of his head and a cattle prod at his back. The shock collar alone wasn't good enough to them. He killed too many of the other fighters outright instead of leaving them to be thrown to the nexus, and this is what he gets. He's stopped trying to escape. It's pointless; they always drag him back. _

_ He's too valuable to simply kill and discard though. He's their prized fighter, after all. Perhaps handicap him so the fights are more interesting if the odds aren't so much his favour. He brings in the money, but winning all the fights so handily bores the crowd and they're running out of the good stock. "This is for your own good,  _ beast _."  _

_ < So why don't you? > _

This is an ignoble death. Does he deserve any less, though? 

_ They keep sending more and more and he cuts them down until the sand of the pit is slaked with blood and the beast pens are empty. People. Animals. They die all the same by his hand. He  _ is _ an animal. They give him promises of freedom; being sent away to have the great honour of becoming Sith. He won't die here. The Jedi left him. His family forgot him. _

_ Who else would take him now? _

_ < Aren't you tired of fighting? > _

_ < Aren't you tired of being this? > _

He opens his eyes. The cavern is dark, but not pitch black. An eerie green haze covers his vision. Old wounds begin to throb again and there's new ones, deep gouges. _Trapped._ Broken, bruised ribs, fractures? Can't tell _._ Can't concentrate enough to be able to check _._ But his lungs haven't collapsed. He doesn't feel like they have, anyway. Small mercies.

_ < Stop fighting it. > _

_ There's a gag around his mouth and the fabric makes him want to wretch. It's stale with sweat, unwashed, just a rag tied around his head to muffle his screaming. He's still been drugged to the gills with suppressants and sedatives to make sure he can't just murder them all as soon as he's out of the containment field. It's a safety precaution with every Force sensitive fighter that's been brought to them. His tolerance just kept increasing, and so they upped the dosage in response. There's enough in his bloodstream right now to tranq a rabid gundark and still he manages to stay awake. _

_ His arms are strapped down either side of him and he can't move, bound to the medical table and there's someone coming with pliers to clamp down on his his right hand and his claws no no  _ **_no_ ** _ \-- _

_ < What's left to live for? _ >

_ < You ruin everything you touch. > _

_ < Just let it kill you. _ >

Why isn't he, then?

Simple instinct, perhaps. A cocktail of pain and claustrophobia induced adrenaline. The body keeps fighting when there's nothing left to do except to lay down and die.

Stubbornness. Spite.

He keeps blinking away tears and this fucking helmet, if he can just get it off and get _out he can't breathe and he's pinned._ His eyes sting and his throat burns. His whole body feels like it's on fire _. He_ can't hyperventilate, though, panic will kill him quicker. He'd just use up the last of the oxygen faster. 

But he's going to suffocate down here, venom antidote or not. His helmet's busted and it was what he was relying on. Stupid mistake.  


He doesn't know if that's  _ worse _ or  _ better _ . He could've been here for hours. Alone.

He thinks of the boy that talked to him on the other side of the wall of his cell. He heard him before he saw him, a voice calling out across the darkness. His accent was rough and tumbled like a spacer but had none of the grit. Ry guessed he was his age, thereabouts. The boy kept asking to get to know him, asked about when his birthday was (he told him that he didn't know. He didn't remember. He still doesn't.) and continued to crack jokes even when they were met with stony silence. He slept most of the time on the ragged blanket on the floor of his cell, ignoring what happened outside. There was nothing else to do except that, with his head so fuzzy and feeling so drowsy that the days would move too slowly for him to stand it for any longer than a few hours at a time. There wasn't a night or day on Nar Shaddaa. The Smuggler's Moon never slept.

But it was comforting to hear another voice, someone that called him  _ him _ and _ friend _ instead of  _ it _ or  _ that one. _ A friend. He didn't think he'd ever had one before him.

He told him his name. " _ Hannen _ ." He gave him. " _ Rai'lyos _ ." He tried it, stumbled over the second syllable, clunky and too large for his mouth, and asked if he could call him  _ Rai _ instead, but that was fine. He'd forgotten what his name sounded like from someone else's mouth, a real person, only able to imagine his mothers or his siblings calling him (he was forgetting what they sounded like, their memory slipping through his fingers like sand) and hearing it again…

It was the first time he hadn't felt alone in a long, long time since he was kidnapped.

And they began to talk.

When he first caught sight of him in the pit as he was ushered away back to the holding rooms, he was being brought in. He was even scrawnier than him, too. He hadn't realised that was possible. Rattataki, none of the tattoos, all knobbly knees and gangly limbs, bruising in a riot of purples, greys and mauve. Blue eyes, like shallow water, like staring too long at the sky when he watched the brith on a cloudless day on Dantooine, laying in prairies where the Kath hounds sunned. He always smiled, and he shone; his laughter was infectious and his joy radiated out like warmth from the summer sun on his fur. Through the worst of it, Hannen always made him feel quietly invincible, as if there was a glimmer of hope they could make it out alive and free.

They did.

Their last and final trial was to fight each other to the death. The victor would go on to be an acolyte. And they refused. Because to lose each other was not worth that freedom.

It was never freedom, not true freedom, anyway. He knows that now. They were beating them into submission. Breaking their minds and spirits until they had nowhere else to go but the Sith. To Baras. Willingly. They painted another form of bondage as their salvation. They did not know better. 

_ The blood dribbles from his chin and stains his hands from the shiv buried in his ribs. Still, the corners of his lips pull upwards in a weak smile. Smiling to the end. _

And so Ry knows this:

Baras has to die. Everyone with him dies.

So he has to get out.

Screaming with the effort to shove the rock away, he wills it to stay there so it can't finish the job, can't make the whole mountain's worth topple down on him, suspended in the air. One by one he pulls them off himself and he can  _ breathe.   
_

He can channel that pain into focus, into clarity, that rage, and he holds onto it for everything he's worth to stay conscious, to keep moving and get out. So long as he holds onto that conviction _, he can keep moving._

He will not die here. 

He gets to his knees, but the effort makes him wheeze and his limbs protest and ache with the strain but he's upright again.

It's one

Agonising step

After the other. 

He emerges, finally, shielding his eyes from the burning sky above the rough hewn chalk cliffs. A dark umber red shot through with black smog and orange. He's never been more sick of the colour in his life.

But he's out. His mind feels like a thousand miles away, disconnected from his body, sluggish and leaden. It's like he's watching himself, floating. His shoulders shake. He's laughing, he realises, almost hysterically, at it all. At the pain, at himself. Then his knees buckle, coughing up blood (more of it, how much more can he afford to lose?). And then he starts to sob instead, burying his face in his hands.  _ Stupid, stupid. _

He gives himself a few minutes to recollect himself. And then he begins the journey back to camp.

* * *

He's covered in plaster and a thick layer of fine dust from the rubble. The cape of his armour is in tatters. Most of it got caught under the rocks, anchoring him there. He used the remainder of it as a makeshift tourniquet to stem the bleeding; if he passes out and dies from blood loss, it's a victory for Baras anyway.

He must look like a fine sight from the way all the Imperials briskly move out of his way at an even quicker pace than usual. No lightsaber, it was buried under the rubble. Not worth trying to dig it out. His helmet had cracked with the initial impact of the debris, (had he not been wearing it, he doubts he would have a head left), he can see out of it, and the air is choked with smog and toxins that the air filters are longer capable of keeping out. 

He limps through the encampment, all eyes on him and his wounds but staying mum. He doesn't want their pity or help or  _ whatever _ passes for sympathy in these parts. They can see his face if they get close enough through the cracked parts of his visor. He just wants them to  _ stop looking at him. _

He's completely delirious from pain when he reaches the medbay.

Two robed figures are standing in the room, and it's empty of any other presences. They call themselves the Servants, belonging to the Hand. Belonging to the Emperor, and they are offering him a proposition. He's to be the Wrath. He might've heard their voices before, outside the cave, muffled as he floated in and out of consciousness, but he's not sure.

But only the name Baras and dead really registers, and he finds himself readily agreeing.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't know how medical stuff works

He comes to (again) in a med-bay. There's an oxygen mask clamped over his mouth and nose and a damp cloth on his forehead. That's the first thing he notices.

Second, he's been peeled or prised out of his armour somehow or another, since he's dressed in much simpler, lighter garments, short sleeved to allow access to his arms. It was stuck to him pretty well. It's a shame. He pulls off the mask with difficulty, it's a bulky thing.

Clean air. He takes a deep lungful of it in, unassisted. And his breath _rattles_. That's probably not good.

It's a starship medbay. Small. Imperial design, blacks and greys, the occasional red and rare green of the diagnostic screens and consoles, sleek, spartan. A singular medical cot, which he's currently occupying. He turns his head, and that takes effort with the stiffness to examine the rest of his surroundings. He's hooked up to a ventilator, that's to his left, and there's a kolto tank to his right; it's empty. The room is too bright. Too loud. Even the lights are buzzing. He shields his eyes with his hands in an effort to save himself from a headache and there's things stuck in his arms that get jostled slightly with the movement. He's never understood how Vette can say that Imperial starships are quiet. There's always something making noises. 

The layout of the room doesn't tell him much though. Most Imperial starships had fairly similar layouts. The rumble of the ship in space is a comforting background rumble. He listens harder trying to pick out the different noises in the din, there within the ship. The engine is whirring away and there's that strange murmuring undertone that comes back every time it needs a tuneup only he can hear (the rest of the crew's hearing isn't as keen as his, granted, none of them are Cathar.)

He'd know the sound of it anywhere. No other ship sounds like this. This place is the closest thing he has to home.

He slumps back into the cot. It's his ship. So he's safe. It's not just him imagining being this, hyper realistic dreams of a brain starved of oxygen from suffocating in the dark. Here and now. He takes a moment to appreciate the miracle of humidity controlled interiors.

He shifts a leg experimentally, trying to see if they're bound or not. He looks down and there are more things on his arms, inserted, there and there's a localized pain where they've been stuck into him, a little soreness but nothing that's worrying. And then he looks at the blanket that's covering his (mercifully clothed) lower body, with little pastel cartoon nerfs on it. It's soft and downy and weighted. Comforting. Probably Vette's doing; it's a nice gesture.

But he's not been strapped down. His limbs just feel like lead. 

Reaching out with his senses, he can tell Jaesa and Vette are in the lounge, their voices hushed. Sewlor is meditating in the crew quarters and Quinn is taking stock of equipment in the cargo hold. He strains to make out the words of the conversation, what with the headache and the lights and everything else it's hard to focus, he can hear the words, but he can't pick up the distinctions in their voices right now. All he can get are snatches.

"Found him passed out ---- Baras?------not making sense--- who ------don't understand. These "Hand" people came and briefed us over the comm -- seem official --do now?--------kept saying the same thing--"

Crash.

He's knocked something by leaning too far forward. The mask. Damnit. It's so loud it makes him grit his teeth and his ears flatten against his head with a wince. Can he reach for it? Nope. Coughing fit. Ugh.

The voices die down and he hears footsteps approaching the medbay. They're light enough that he knows with certainty they're Vette's.

He manages to stop coughing in time to call out to her. "...Vette?" he croaks. His mouth feels full of cotton and his tongue is like sandpaper. 

Her face softens a little, concerned furrows in her brow smoothing as she stands in the doorway. "Hey Ry."

"I don't… how did I get back?" 

He starts to prop himself up but Vette puts her hands on his shoulders to make him lie back again. 

"Hey, hey, take it easy." He complies, reluctantly, and sighs.

"You don't remember, I guess, but," Vette's voice is quiet. "You didn't, really. You comm'd us for an emergency evac, thought it would take a while to get permission to land planetside but I think… those Hand people gave us the clearance. You sounded _really_ out of it. Like. _Really,_ really out of it, like you were having a bad trip or something."

"Feels like it." There's a low grade migraine building and his head feels fuzzy. Too much stimuli. "Turn the lights off?" 

She goes to the light switch and his eyes don't hurt so much anymore. Then she hands him a cup of water. He downs it gratefully.

"That better?"

"Much." It still hurts. Everything really hurts. But it's a marked improvement. Thanks."

"Yeah, well. You had a cave dropped on your head, and then dragged yourself out and all the way back to camp so… that's pretty insane. We got there and then you passed out on the ramp. Had to drag you back in. You were really banged up."

"How long was I out?" He dimly notices the sheer number of cannulas inserted into his arms, something he hadn't first realised when he first woke up, there's a drip running. Several of them, in fact. Saline, maybe antibiotics. He's assuming it's been at least a few days, then, since he's become a Cathar pincushion. It might not. Quinn is nothing but efficient, he'll give him that.

"Quinn's had time to patch you up while you were out." Vette continues. "It's been like, uh, maybe a week? You were in the kolto tank for a few days to heal up the worst of it, and when we got you out, you kept mumbling about something while you were asleep, names, something about Baras -- it was like... really incoherent but it was the same things, over and over again."

He doesn't know what to make of that. An awkward silence passes between the two of them.

"Even Quinn was really surprised, y'know. He ran some tests and he said you should have died from all that blood loss and how much of the venom you'd been inhaling. Think you caught a really nasty lung infection. You weren't even responding to half the meds until he put up dosage that should've been enough for a rancor. What the hell is your threshold anyway?"

He shrugs, or as best he can. He feels pretty stiff all over.

She sighs and reaches out to brush his arm where it's the least tender when she touches him. "Anyway. I'm glad you're ok. Really. I kinda knew you'd pull through. You're a Sith, after all. You're capable of some pretty insane bantha shit, and you're also the toughest and stubbornest person I know. I know that pretty much first-hand."

"Thanks. I think." Vette's brand of humour always deflated the tension and set him at ease. "What was I saying?"

"Well." She counts them on her fingers as she lists them. "Baras, that you're going to kill him.. Baras, again, the usual Sithy stuff when you're in your usual rage zone and pissed off with someone..."

"Ah." That explained why his vocal chords felt like they'd be run through a cheese grater.

"I guess one of them was a name, though. Not one I'd ever heard of before from you. Was it someone... important to you?"

"A name?"

She tries out the name. "...''Hannen''?"

"Oh." He goes quiet. "He was."

"I'm… guessing you said " _was_ " for a reason." She sits on the bed, the weight shifting just a bit, anticipating a story. 

He closes his eyes, then stares up at the ceiling, exhaling slowly through his nose. He'd rather not look at her directly. Especially not in the eyes. Doesn't want to see her pitying him. It's uncomfortable to see people trying to empathise with you when you're baring your heart to them. His throat hurts so fucking much, it's bloody and raw but he keeps talking anyway.

"He… died. Not even a good death either. We were pitfighters. Broke out together. Killed everyone that wasn't property."

"Like Nok did."

"Mm," he nods. "Was free for a while. On the run. Good few months. Then they caught up with us."

"'They' being…?" She offers another cup of water, and he takes it. He needed that.

"Baras' people. Got the drop on us and shivved Hannen. I killed them. Didn't know they were his. But the whole thing, my… master.." and he tails off the word feels strange in his mouth, calling Zhet that again after disavowing the man and tearing off his Padawan braid from the rest of his matted hair in a fit. It's always going to have unsavoury associations to him. So he tells Jaesa not to call him that. Because he's not her master. He's not sure what the substitute is though. He elaborates. "What my _Jedi_ master was investigating, before he," miming a line drawn across his throat, "and I got nabbed, they were feeding the slaves into the Sith. I didn't know they we were going to Baras."

"How'd you figure it out in the end?"

"Draahg... told me enough to piece it together. Baras wanted to collect. Cost him a lot of potentials."

 _Potentials_. A nicer term than chattel or stock. That's what he was. That's what they were. Vette stays quiet, but her mouth's a thin line. She undestands the the euphemism. There's an unspoken understanding between the two of them; two of a kind, both slaves, once. They know the way well. Too well.

"Took the best of the stock as his apprentices, if they survived the trials, I guess." A short, mirthless laugh. Cutting the wheat from the chaff. "Everyone else... entertainment. Fed to the beasts when they weren't useful anymore."

They wrung out that last bit of value by dragging them out in the intermissions into the pit to be ogled. The nexu were starving, tore them to shreds as they tried to get away, and they feasted on their corpse to the whoops and jeers of the spectators. It was better to die outright. He tried to make sure every match he spared his foes that fate. It was a cleaner death. Saved their dignity. He still stood by it.

Vette blanches, and her lekku squirm, curling in on themselves. Her aura retracts just the same, coiling up.

"But… didn't you get picked up by that Kallig off of Narsh?"

"I did. Just had a head-start with her sponsorship." She was eccentric, that much was true. "Owe her a lot, though." Penndi was not even a Lord herself at the time yet, and still apprenticed to Darth Zash, only a few years older than him. She had her own strange brand of kindness, taking him under her wing like that, at his _truly_ lowest point. There was something sisterly about her; she was the closest thing he had to Khara, maybe.

He was nineteen, with too much grief and rage to know what to do with except to turn to her, and too naive to know any better.

 _Hannen_ . _Cornered_ . _The shiv winks in the grip of his assailant in the alley, catching the dingy neon lights of the billboard. There's too many. Ry isn't close enough, isn't fast enough to stop it. It buries itself into his chest and Ry_ screams, _vision going red._

_He's running to Hannen before the last body has even hit the ground to join the bloodied heap. He's begun to slump against the wall._

_Blood bubbles from his parted lips and dribbles off his chin, a deep crimson staining his skin_ . _He's dying, and Ry feels it, knows it, no matter how he screams in denial, trying to stem the flow and he can't hear himself over his sheer panic--dying dying he's_ **_dying_ ** _\--_

_But he just keeps smiling, it's infuriating; through the pain, the blood loss, and telling him it's okay, because he's here with him. But it's not. It's really not._

_Hannen's pressing his moonstone glass pendant into his hands, hands trembling and barely able to pull it off, telling him to keep it as something to remember him by._

_It wasn't worth much, a cheap tacky piece you could get for a credit chit. He'd stolen from a stall because Ry saw it and it made him think of him, that he'd like it. He loved it. He wore it all the time. On quiet nights, before they escaped, if they were careful about the guard changes, ears pressed to the wall, Hannen had talked about gemstones on his homeworld, caverns that sparkled just like the moons and stars in the night sky. Or so he'd heard. He'd seen neither._

_He stays with him long after his body's cooled and his eyes have gone glassy and unfocused, cradling him close to his chest and his cheeks are damp with tears. He won't leave him. He doesn't know how to. He failed him._

_That's how her people had found him._

He shakes his head to dispel the memory. It's one he's been haunted by enough.

"He used me. Baras... used me, I'm such an _idiot._ Worst part is that I just _let_ him... should've known and pieced it together sooner…"

"Hey, hey, I get it." She's nodding, slowly. "Don't beat yourself up about it, it's not your fault--"

 _"It is_." He says abruptly. "I'm going after him, going to kill him, everyone with him. All of them. Every single last one. I won't stop until there's nothing left." His face is burning up and the tears are welling in his eyes and his voice shakes. He doesn't remember the last time his voice shook this bad.

"Are you sure? I'm with you all the way, and so’s Jaesa and Sewlor. I can't vouch for Captain Stick-Up-His-Ass but… you're really, completely set on this?"

"Yes." It isn't reason, it isn't sense, it just _is._ He clutches the little piece of moonstone glass with clammy hands, still hung around his neck. Had the piece not been rounded and smoothed down already he would have cut his palm on it. But there it stays, cool and indifferent.

The Hand has given him an opportunity and he's going to take it with both hands.

"Because I don't think I can't live with myself otherwise."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, first fic I've written and posted in…. Ever? the last time was like 5 years. Dang. This might even be my first /real/ fic. I'm ridiculously surprised by how much I smashed out. Seriously. I found this in my Drive at ~500 words a few days ago, basically a skeleton and then miraculously started throwing words at it over the next few days. AND IT MULTIPLIED. basically it got meaty, and here we are. An all-nighter was involved and I regret nothing :^D
> 
> (That's a lie. Oh sweet sweet sleep please claim me I'm in hell)
> 
> Anyway. This has been in the making for... how many months has it been since November? Seven? I thought about this a lot when i was in a dark place when I'd been sectioned in a psych ward. I'd first played the Sith Warrior story a long long time ago with Ry (he's 8 years old this year if you can believe it or not.) and I hadn't thought much about this part of it as ever relating to me but. Sitting there, in that cold white room with the thin green sheets and the frosted class window, the dingy faux purple chair in the corner and the weird sink that looked like a face and a door that you could never keep locked, I really related to the metaphorical trappedness for some reason. I was bloody terrified. When I got out and got back to uni I just. Typed. and vented out. I found the file again this week and here we are. Been stewing in impstor syndrome for so long I forgot how fun it is to write. It's really, really fun. (the formatting to post here is not. but i digress.)
> 
> aaaaanyway. I'm over at disaster-bi-shan on tumblr as my swtor sideblog.


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